botnet

VPN-under-fire Hola has issued a mea-culpa after fears the service had turned users' computers into a botnet. Concerns about the way the company's P2P virtual private network had been utilized for potentially nefarious purposes kicked off last week, after users realized that their idle bandwidth was being sold off under a secondary brand, and possibly used to commit distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on servers.

Free virtual private network (VPN) service Hola, available as a popular Chrome extension, is well-known among users who frequently like to watch videos and TV shows from other countries that location blocked. Sadly, it has just been discovered that owners of the service have actually been selling users' bandwidth as botnet, or bulk traffic that can be purchased and used in a denial-of-service attack on a website. Hola claims this has always been clear in their terms of service, but users say they have never been made aware of this bandwidth usage.

The Pony botnet has been identified as a digital wallet thief, done so by Trustwave's SpiderLabs, which detailed its findings in a recent blog post. The botnet is known to steal credentials, but to a lesser degree it is also nabbing digital coins from the wallets of infected users. The theft takes place across multiple currency types: Bitcoin, Litecoin, and 28 more.

A company called Solve Media has issued its quarterly update on the traffic generated on the web from fraudulent sources. The report is called the Quarterly Bot Traffic Market Advisory. The latest report looks at Q3 2013.

Microsoft has announced that it has disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet with help from the FBI, Europol, and industry partners. Microsoft says that this is the third time this year that it and its partners have disrupted dangerous botnets that affect millions of people each day. The ZeroAccess botnet is also known as the Sirefef botnet.

On June 5, we reported on a take down of Citadel botnet networks by Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit and the FBI, among other unspecified "technology industry partners." The assault had resulted in 1400 Citadel botnet networks being taken down, and now Microsoft has revealed the number of computers liberated as a result: at least 2 million.

On TechNet today, Microsoft Digital Crime Unit's Assistant General Counsel Richard Boscovich detailed the company's involvement in helping take down over a thousand Citadel botnets, which are used to mine banking data, among other info. The work was done in conjunction with the FBI, members from within the financial industry, and "other technology industry partners."

This week the Botnet known as Bamital has been reported dead by the two warriors that claim to have killed it: Symantec and Microsoft. This report shows that the death of said botnet will take down its abilities in full: hijacking search results galore being the main evil this Bamital creature was working with. Each time a user in the line of fire searched for something using search engines from whens they'd be sent to a malicious 3rd party site, having malware installed from that point.

Microsoft has kicked off a new initiative to try to stop the spread of the Nitol Botnet, and it has the backing of a US District Court in East Virginia in doing so. Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit was granted permission to go after those distributing the Botnet after it was discovered that cybercriminals were infiltrating the company's supply chain. Apparently, these unfavorable folks were loading counterfeit software housing the malware onto PCs at some point in the supply chain, leading retailers to unknowingly sell the infected machines.

There are dedicated botnets out there in the wide world that exist solely for the purpose of distributing spam. Grub, the third largest botnet in the world, was finally taken offline by security experts yesterday, resulting in a dramatic 18% reduction of global spam. Grum’s servers, which were based in Russia, Panama, and the Netherlands, controled around 100,000 PCs. The two botnets that take first and second place, Cutwail and Lethic, are still active.

Microsoft launched a surprise raid on botnet operators late last week, it's been revealed, though experts suggest the strike against Zeus may deliver only very short-term gains. The company seized servers, domain names and other evidence from two offices in Pennsylvania and Illinois on Friday, March 23, the NYTimes reports, challenging those who harvest credit card and other personal data from unwitting internet users - as well as potentially turning their PCs into DDOS weapons - rather than waiting for federal agencies to get into gear.

We have some bad news today for haters of spam everywhere. Apparently, the Kelihos botnet that Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab shutdown in September 2011 is making a comeback. The botnet is spamming once again. The botnet was able to infect 45,000 computers before being shutdown and was sending out 4 billion spam messages a day. The spam messages flooded the web with promotions for porn, illegal drugs, and other scams.